Science

October 05, 2014

The human response to architecture is usually based on subjective emotions: I like that building, I hate this space; this room is so open, this office is oppressive. But something more nuanced is happening to elicit these responses. Neuroscientists have found that distinctive processes occur in our brains—consciously and subconsciously, cognitively and physiologically—from the moment we step into a space. These processes affect our emotions, our health, and even the development of memory.

Interest in the way architecture can support how our brains work and evolve is growing. READ MORE>>

February 08, 2011

Monitoring change in nature can provide insights into both environmental and human change. By connecting the natural world to the internet, communities and organizations are better able to monitor and respond to nature’s ebb and flow in real-time.

Implications

Wired plants and crops can report on their health and indicate the correct time to harvest.

Audio sensing can detect minor changes in the environment to warn of avalanches, mudslides or earthquakes.

Citizens become engaged in creating two-way data flows; use information to better understand their immediate surroundings.

Communities reconnect with nature and understand their impact better.

Heightened awareness of natural cycles increases ability to determine long and short term trends.

Real-time weather information enables businesses to work with nature and minimize inefficiencies.

Better ablility to monitor invasive species and deal with cross border issues.

February 20, 2010

We often describe the triple bottom line - society, economy, and environment - as three intersecting circles of equal size. This is nonsense. The reality is that the largest circle should represent the biosphere. Within that, we have 30 million species, including us, that depend on it. Within the biosphere circle should be a much smaller circle, which is human society, and within that should be an even smaller circle, the economy. Neither of the inner circles should grow large enough to intersect with the bigger ones, but that's what's happening now as human societies and the economy hit their limits.

We also draw lines around property, cities, provinces, and countries. We take these so seriously that we are willing to fight and die to protect those borders. But nature pays no attention to human boundaries. Air, water, soil that blows across continents and oceans, migrating fish, birds and mammals, and windblown seeds cannot be managed within human strictures, yet all the discussions in Copenhagen were centred on countries that, in turn, were divided into rich and poor. In science-fiction movies where an alien from outer space attacks and kills humans, national differences disappear as we join forces to fight a common enemy. That is what we have to tap into to meet the climate crisis.

Nature is our home. Nature provides our most fundamental needs. Nature dictates limits. If we are striving for a truly sustainable future, we have to subordinate our activities to the limits that come from nature. We know how much carbon dioxide can be reabsorbed by all the green things in the oceans and on land, and we know we are exceeding those limits. That's why carbon is building up in the atmosphere. So our goal is clear. All of humanity must find a way to keep emissions below the limits imposed by the biosphere.

February 17, 2010

...to some scientists, what happened in New Orleans, while devastating, wasn’t very surprising or unexpected. They see a system that was insufficiently robust to handle the blow it was dealt. They see a highly ordered, complex state – commercial districts and neighborhoods, social networks and infrastructure networks, cycles of water, energy, and food consumption – reduced to a state of chaos and disorder. From this perspective, the problem wasn’t merely an incompetent leadership and not enough FEMA trailers. It was a fundamental question of resilience.

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and co-evolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held assumption that systems respond to change in a linear, predictable fashion is simply wrong. According to resilience thinking, systems are in constant flux; they are highly unpredictable and self-organizing, with feedbacks across time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmarks of complexity.

More and more research is leading scientists to believe (and engage in further research) that we humans function much better when there is some piece of nature around us. Even if it is just a small patch of grass or a glimpse of a tree, we seem to be able to concentrate better, heal quicker from injury, make better decisions, even live longer, when we have some exposure to natural elements, in our urban world.

October 03, 2009

Currently on exhibit at NYC’s The Urban Center (Sept.
17-Nov. 7, 2009),"Toward the Sentient City" explores the evolving relationship between ubiquitous
computing, architecture and urban space. Organized by The Architectural League
of New York, the exhibit looks at how various forms of ambient, mobile, and
ubiquitous computer technologies inform the architecture of urban space and/or
influence our behavior within it.

Included are five commissions by teams of architects,
artists and technologists:

Too Smart City

Amphibious Architecture

Natural Fuse (harnessing the carbon-sinking capabilities of plants to create a city-wide
network…)

Trash Track

Breakout! (what if the entire city was your office?)

As exhibition curator Mark Shepard beautifully states:

“’When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no
more important than the rain, in fact the weather has probably more to do with
the pulsation of the Living City at that given moment.’ – Peter Cook

One could argue that this provocation by Peter Cook,
published in 1963 in the catalogue for the Living City exhibition at the
Institute for Contemporary Art, London, remains remarkably relevant for anyone
interested in the design and inhabitation of the contemporary city. In place of
natural weather systems, however, today we find the dataclouds of 21st century
urban space increasingly shaping our experience of this city and the choices we
make there. To what degree are these informatic weather systems becoming as
important, if not more so, than the formal organization of space and material?

Since the late 1980s, computer scientists and engineers have
been researching ways of embedding computational ‘intelligence’ into the built
environment….”

August 08, 2009

Imagine the City of Manhattan 400 years ago, before the Dutch founded a fur trading settlement on the southern tip of the island known as "Nieuw Amsterdam". Once, this was a rich landscape of forests, fields, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, beaches and streams, supporting a wide variety of flora and fauna and home to the Lenape tribes.

This re-envisioning of Manhattan is the focus of the Mannahatta Project at New York’s Wildlife Conservation Society. It reflects nearly a decade of research led by Eric Sanderson, a senior conservation ecologist for WCS at the Bronx Zoo, after he came across a British Headquarters map from 1782. In turn, he speculated what life might have been like in 1609, before the skyscrapers, subways and crowded sidewalks, when Henry Hudson first gazed upon the region. The results are amazing: computer-generated, interactive images of the island, called “Mannahatta” by the native peoples, as it might have looked then. Sanderson describes the evolution of the project in this video. The Mannahatta exhibition continues at the Museum of the City of New York through October 12. Sanderson, who’s an expert in the application of geographic principles and techniques to problems in wildlife, landscape, and ecological conservation, also published a book on the project, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, last May.

Still, the project’s centerpiece is the online presentation, a place to explore the island block by block from the present back to 1609. I decided to examine the area surrounding the Chrysler Building at 405 Lexington Avenue, bounded by 43rd and 44th Streets between Third Avenue and Lexington. The project site features a detailed reconstruction of the immediate landscape, wildlife and human habitat that likely existed here four centuries ago, contrasted with the dense urban space of today. Incredible.